By Steve Rhodes

“Pakistani authorities said Wednesday they have jailed and intend to charge Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s former city comptroller Amer Ahmad after taking him into custody Monday with a fake Mexican passport, a forged visa to enter their country and a large amount of cash,” the Sun-Times reports.

Ahmad was carrying about $146,000 and 126,000 euros in cash when he was stopped by authorities Monday morning at the international airport in Lahore, said Usman Anwar, the Punjab region director for the Federal Investigation Agency, the Pakistani equivalent of the FBI.
“He said he that he lived in America and lied that he never had American nationality,” Anwar told the Chicago Sun-Times from the FIA’s offices in Lahore.
“He said he came home to Pakistan and didn’t say he was involved in fraud or anything,” Anwar said. “We Googled him.”

Which is more than Rahm’s vetting squad did.

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Posted on April 30, 2014

By Steve Rhodes

“Former Chicago Ald. Dick Mell, one of the most gregarious political creatures ever to grace City Hall, is back in the game with a new lobbying firm he founded with the help of daughter Patti Blagojevich,” the Tribune reports.
Too perfect.

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Posted on April 29, 2014

By Steve Rhodes

“More white students are walking the halls at Chicago’s top four public high schools,” the Sun-Times reports.
Go read it.
*
Welcome back. I thought this was particularly interesting, though not the main thrust of the article:

The Chicago school system now has 10 “selective-enrollment” high schools.
Students are admitted to these based on their standardized test results, admissions test scores and grades, as well as on socioeconomic criteria.
Five of the schools – Brooks, King, Lindblom, South Shore and Westinghouse, all on the South Side and the West Side – see few applications from whites and have virtually no white students.

There could be many reasons for this. One, of course, is pure bigotry. Another is that housing segregation simply puts those schools at undesirable distances from where many white folks live. I wonder, too, if those schools somehow compare unfavorably to non-selective schools in white neighborhoods, though I’d be somewhat surprised if that was the case.
The real lesson, though, is that we cannot divorce education from race and housing. Schools don’t exist in vacuums, nor do their successes and failures.

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Posted on April 28, 2014

By Steve Rhodes

We here at the Weekend Desk just want the Bulls and Blackhawks to stay alive as deep into the baseball season as possible not just for their own sake, but because even a season of heroics like Jose Abreu’s walk-off granny on Friday night cannot contain the miasma oozing from the North Side at record contamination levels.
So yay. And yay.
And before we know it, the Bears will be reporting to training camp.
And I cannot believe I just wrote that, but this is how a Cubs fan thinks these days. Just get me to 2016 or 2017 or 2018 (or 2019, when all CPS schools will supposedly be air-conditioned) when we can find out Theo’s Plan was all a bunch of bunk imposed on us by a greedy nutwing patriarch and his incompetent, spoiled kids and we can start all over again.
Which is just what I discuss with our very own Jim “Coach” Coffman on this weekend’s episode of The Beachwood Radio Hour. Other topics include: Chicagoland Exposed. Rahm’s Receipts. Inside The New Obama High School. Bill Daley Never Cared About You. Transit R Not Us. With music by Strawberry, Neil Young, Bobby Bare Jr., Gemini Club, Billy Bragg and Elvis Costello.

And:
Here’s this weekend’s edition of Beachwood International with The Angry Aussie, also featuring a takedown of Chicagoland, as well as Beer with bin Laden in Brazil, Fake Cuban Twitter in Costa Rica, CNN “Goes Native” in New Zealand, and the first installment of our new weekly series “Australia Is The Florida of the World.”

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Posted on April 26, 2014

By Steve Rhodes

Way behind with so much going on and so much great stuff elsewhere on the site today, so let’s just move to that.
* Exposing Chicagoland: Turns out Rahm Emanuel executive produced after all. My take on the Tribune’s blockbuster.
Our regular Tweeting Chicagoland feature will appear sometime between now and Monday. Also, watch this space on Saturday evening for our Beachwood International podcast with The Angry Aussie as we discuss the Trib story and this week’s final episode, as well as the next edition of The Beachwood Radio Hour.
* Exclusive! Inside The New Barack Obama High School: As we are wont to do, we have the inside scoop on the mayor’s new pet project. Rated F for funny.
* This Week In Deadspin Chicago: One of the weirdest weeks in recent Chicago sports history produced humiliating hijinks from Homer City.
* Blue Plane Blues: What you can’t see is the sound. In Beachwood Photo Booth.
* Bulls Star With Brooklyn Roots Is Same As Ever: Different: The New York Times looks at Joakim Noah.
* The Week In Chicago Rock: Neil Young, Bobby Bare Jr., Gemini Club, Goo Goo Dolls, Sam Smith, The Knife, and Ryan Eclipse.

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Posted on April 25, 2014

By Steve Rhodes

“Less than half of students at Benito Juarez Community Academy High School graduated in 2008 when Juan Carlos Ocon took over as principal, but by 2013, he said, the rate rose to about 69 percent,” the Sun-Times reports.

The secret of Juarez’s success – and the success of 19 other neighborhood high schools in Chicago in getting more students to graduation day – started with the school’s ninth-graders and keeping them “on track,” according to new research to be released Thursday by the University of Chicago’s Consortium on Chicago School research.
Shepherding ninth-graders through their first year of high school – focusing on helping them to show up to class and complete their work so they pass their courses – leads to jumps in graduation rates, even at high schools once thought of as “dropout factories,” according to the study.
“Attention to those very small things has a big payoff,” said Elaine Allensworth, who directs the Consortium, adding that schools need to intervene as soon as freshmen show a dip in attendance or decline in effort.

The Consortium is one of the few reliable institutions we’ve got, so this is indeed significant. I was particularly struck by this passage:
“The interventions that have worked so far are less expensive and dramatic than a schoolwide turnaround or conversion to a charter school, she said. The gains spanned gender and race but were highest for African-American males.”

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Posted on April 24, 2014

By Steve Rhodes

The Papers will return on Thursday.
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t fresh Beachwood content to enjoy . . .
* The Political Odds. Updated to reflect recent developments.
* Honoring Hot Dog Richie’s. In our Random Food Report.
* The Chicago Youth Boxing Club Is Really Not About The Boxing. The Gym vs. The Streets.
* Branding The Pope. In the hands of Loyola Press.
* Orlando Rivera And His Chicago Cuatro Orchestra. A true cultural warrior.

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Posted on April 23, 2014

By Steve Rhodes

“Mayor Rahm Emanuel [Monday] wouldn’t say why he spent taxpayer money on out-of-town trips in which he mixed city business with politics, but defended the travel expenses as legitimate.”
Saying why would be snitching.

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Posted on April 22, 2014

By Steve Rhodes

“Under former Mayor Richard M. Daley, City Hall paid millions of dollars in legal fees to Katten Muchin Rosenman, the law firm where Daley now works,” the Sun-Times reports.
“But under Daley’s successor, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the firm has seen its City Hall business fall sharply, records show.
“Last year, Chicago taxpayers paid Katten Muchin $139,964 – the lowest amount the firm has been paid by City Hall in more than 16 years.”
Surely that’s just a coincidence.

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Posted on April 21, 2014

By Natasha Julius

We know what you’re thinking: “If I had a nickel for every time this has happened to me . . .”
Right?
Market Update
The domestic market for Oligarchs is now so hot we’ve been forced to try importing them.

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Posted on April 19, 2014